The present invention relates generally to methods and systems for radiocommunications and, more particularly, to such systems in which a connection can be handed over from one channel or base station to another.
The cellular telephone industry has made phenomenal strides in commercial operations in the United States as well as the rest of the world. Growth in major metropolitan areas has far exceeded expectations and is rapidly outstripping system capacity. If this trend continues, the effects of this industry""s growth will soon reach even the smallest markets. Innovative solutions are required to meet these increasing capacity needs as well as maintain high quality service and avoid rising prices.
In cellular systems, the capability is typically provided to transfer handling of a connection between, for example, a mobile station and a base station to another base station, as the mobile station changes its position and so moves out of the coverage area of one base station and into the coverage area of another base station. This type of handoff is commonly referred to as an xe2x80x9cintercellxe2x80x9d handoff as the coverage areas associated with base stations are commonly referred to as xe2x80x9ccellsxe2x80x9d. Depending upon the quality of the current channel, it may also be desirable to transfer a connection from one channel of the base station to another channel supported by the same base station, which handoffs are commonly referred to as xe2x80x9cintracellxe2x80x9d handoffs.
So-called xe2x80x9chardxe2x80x9d handoffs refer to handoffs which are performed wherein there is no significant overlap between transmissions received from an original, serving base station and transmissions received from a new, target base station. As shown in FIG. 1(a), during hard handoff, the mobile station (MS) typically first breaks its connection to its original base station (BTS1) and then establishes a connection to its new base station (BTS2).
By way of contrast, xe2x80x9csoftxe2x80x9d handoffs refer to handoffs wherein, for some period of time, a mobile station receives substantially the same information from two (or more) transmission sources. An exemplary soft handoff scenario is illustrated in FIG. 1(b). Therein, before starting soft handoff, the MS is connected to BTS1. During the soft handoff, the MS establishes a connection to BTS2 without dropping the connection to BTS1. Each base station which is concurrently communicating with a particular mobile station may be referred to as a member of that mobile station""s xe2x80x9cactive setxe2x80x9d. At some time after the connection to BTS2 is set up, the connection to BTS1 will be released which is the termination of the soft handover procedure. The overlapping transmissions from BTS1 and BTS2 permit the mobile station to smoothly switch from receiving information from its original, serving base station to receiving information from its new, target base station. During soft handoff, the mobile station may also take advantage of the fact that it is receiving substantially the same information from two sources to improve its received signal quality by performing diversity selection/combining of the two received signals.
For the sake of simplicity, the foregoing examples of the hard and soft handoff were described in the context of base stations employing omnidirectional antennas, i.e., wherein each base station transmits signals which propagate in a substantially circular direction, i.e., 360 degrees. However, as will be appreciated by those skilled in the art, other antenna structures and transmission techniques may also be employed in radiocommunication systems. For example, a cell can be subdivided into several sectors, e.g., into three sectors where each sector covers a 120 degree angle as shown in FIG. 2. Alternatively, the system or cell may employ an array antenna structure as shown in FIG. 3. Therein, an exemplary radio communication system 200 includes a radio base station 220 employing a fixed-beam phased array (not shown). The phased array generates a plurality of fixed narrow beams (B1, B2, B3, B4, etc.) which radially extend from the base station 220, at least one of which (B1) is used to communicate with MS 210. Preferably, the beams overlap to create a contiguous coverage area to service a radio communication cell. Although not shown, the phased array can actually consist of three phased array sector antennas.
Of course, the principles described above with respect to hard and soft handoff for omnidirectional antennas in FIGS. 1(a) and 1(b) can be directly mapped to other systems which employ sectorized and/or array antennas. In these latter types of systems, hard and soft handoffs can be performed between sectors or beams of the same base station as well as between sectors or beams associated with different base stations.
Both types of handoff have their drawbacks and advantages. On the one hand, soft handoff provides a robust mechanism for changing the connection from one base station to another. However, since the mobile station is connected to more than one base station during soft handoff, soft handoff requires more system resources than hard handoff. An advantage of hard handoff, therefore, is a reduced need for system resources, while its drawback is a higher probability of dropped calls when compared to soft handoff.
Both hard and soft handoffs may be employed in radiocommunication systems using any type of access methodology, e.g., Frequency Division Multiple Access (FDMA), Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA), Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA), or any hybrid thereof. For the purposes of illustration, rather than limitation, this description shall primarily describe conventional techniques and techniques according to the present invention in terms of CDMA systems, however those skilled in the art will appreciate that the inventive techniques are equally applicable to systems employing any access methodology. In radiocommunication systems employing a CDMA access technique, a mobile station can be concurrently connected to one or more sectors that belong to one or more base stations. As mentioned above, the sectors which the mobile station uses for communication are called xe2x80x9cactive setxe2x80x9d. Consider, as an example, the system illustrated in FIG. 4 having cells C1 and C2 with the sectors S1 . . . S6 each. Let A, B and E denote the sectors C1-S1, C1-S2 and C2-S5, respectively, that the mobile station 400 is connected to, i.e., mobile station 400""s active set.
Due to the movement of the mobile station 400 (and possibly other influences), the quality of each connection is time variant. Quality in this context refers to one or more specific types of measurement, e.g., the received signal strength or the downlink signal-to-interference ratio. To adapt to the time variance in quality of a connection, the mobile station 400 is provided with a set of sectors whose transmissions are to be monitored with respect to their received signal quality. This set is called the measurement set. By periodically evaluating the quality of the sectors in the measurement set, the mobile station 400 identifies a set of sectors that are suitable to be members of the active set, referred to as the candidate set. When the membership of the current active set and that of the candidate set differ from each other, the mobile station 400 sends a measurement report to the system, e.g., to a radio network controller (RNC, not shown). The measurement report contains information regarding the quality of transmission received from the sectors of the candidate set. The RNC then decides whether to perform a hard or soft handover, i.e., which sectors shall be added to and/or deleted from the active set. The RNC also requests setup and release of radio and network resources for the connection between the mobile station and the relevant base station(s)in order to perform the handoff. After the handoff has been accomplished, the contents of the active set are updated in the mobile station (and the RNC).
However, there exist a number of different techniques by which to evaluate whether, based on the measurements reported by the mobile station to the system, a handoff is desirable and, if so, what type of handoff. Some of these techniques used fixed thresholds, while others use dynamic thresholds. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 5,422,933 describes a method and system for handing off an ongoing communication from a serving cell to a neighboring cell of a cellular communication system. A dynamic threshold is calculated for effecting handover in accordance with various operating conditions. The current mobile minimum attenuation level, the minimum permissible attenuation level of a serving cell and a neighboring cell, together with the RF signal strength of the mobile unit at the neighboring cell and the serving cell are used in calculating the dynamic threshold.
Another example can be found in U.S. Pat. No. 5,483,669, which patent describes a method and system for handing off an on-going communication from a sending to a neighboring cell of a cellular communication system. A dynamic threshold is calculated for effecting the handoff, for example based on a minimum attenuation level of the mobile unit and a minimum level permitted by a neighboring cell. These latter two systems, however, suffer from the drawback that the determination of the dynamic threshold is rather complex due to the number of cases to be considered and that there is no provision for handling soft handoff.
More recently, a proposal has been described for a CDMA system known as CDMA 2000. Within the CDMA 2000 documentation there is a description of dynamic thresholds used for soft handoff. According to this description, a forward pilot channel is added to the candidate set if a measured quality level exceeds a given static threshold T1. The candidate set contains the sectors that are evaluated more frequently and that are tested against a second dynamic threshold T2. The dynamic threshold T2 is calculated based on using the sum of the received signal quality measurements for all pilot channels in the active set. However, this scheme suffers from the limitation that it is only provided for the forward link (i.e, the downlink), is also rather complex and requires a two-step (i.e., evaluation with respect to static and dynamic threshold) procedure for addition and deletion of sectors to and from the active set.
Accordingly, there is a need to develop enhanced techniques to determine when a handoff is appropriate, and which type of handoff is appropriate, to efficiently utilize system resources under different operating conditions.
These, and other, problems, drawbacks, and limitations of conventional handoff techniques, are overcome according to the present invention in which adaptive thresholds can be provided for a variety of different thresholds used in evaluating the desirability of both soft and hard handoffs. According to exemplary embodiments, soft handoff thresholds for adding, deleting and replacing members of the active set vary based on a quality level of a best or worst member of the current active set. Similarly, a threshold used to determine when a hard handoff is desirable can also be made variable based on a quality level of an active set member.
The present invention provides a number of benefits as compared with conventional techniques for performing handoffs including: (1) flexibly controlling both hard and soft handoffs, (2) less complex threshold calculation that is, at the same time, dynamic in nature so as to vary with changes in channel quality, (3) a reduction in the average number of sectors (or other types of transmission sources, e.g., beams) that a mobile station is concurrently connected to, (4) providing a mechanism for controlling the relative number of soft and hard handoffs by selection of the minimum and maximum threshold values and the slopes in the adaptive threshold functions, (5) a reduction in the probability of dropped calls as compared to conventional techniques which employ higher, fixed handoff thresholds and (6) a reduction in interuser interference as compared to conventional techniques which employ case that employ lower, fixed thresholds such that the active set contains a relatively high number of sectors.